This file provides information for replicating the results from Reilly S. Steel, "Partisan Bias in Securities Enforcement," forthcoming in the Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization.

DATA

There are two data files needed to run the analyses: (i) "data_for_investigation_analysis.RData" and (ii) "data_for_enforcement_analysis.RData". 

Due to confidentiality restrictions imposed by certain data sources, some of the data are omitted from the public data files, "data_for_investigation_analysis_public.RData" and "data_for_enforcement_analysis_public.RData". Specifically, I omit all WRDS variables (e.g., Compustat financial information, and restatement indicators calculated based on WRDS data), all raw enforcement data, and all raw investigation data. In practice, this means that the public data files will be sufficient to reproduce the results that do not contain control variables (e.g., columns 1 and 4 from Table 1, columns 1 and 3 from Table 2, and column 1 from Table 3) and do not require raw enforcement or investigation data (e.g., Figure 3 requires raw enforcement data).

I will provide the private data files, "data_for_investigation_analysis.RData" and "data_for_enforcement_analysis.RData", upon request to any researcher who obtains permission from Blackburne et al. (2021) (corresponding author: Daniel Taylor) and the NYU Pollack Center for Law & Business (https://www.law.nyu.edu/centers/pollackcenterlawbusiness/seed) and provides proof of the relevant licenses from WRDS (Compustat and the WRDS SEC Analytics Suite). Alternatively, you may obtain the data from the relevant sources yourself, with Compustat data via WRDS from Compustat - North America - Fundamentals Annual. Please note that the Compustat variables were transformed as described in Table B1 in the Online Appendix, using the winsorize() function from the datawizard R package (e.g., winsorize(at, threshold = 0.025) or roa = winsorize(oiadp / at, threshold = 0.05)).

CODE

There are two files containing code necessary to reproduce the tables and figures in the paper and online appendix: (i) "investigation_analysis.R" and (ii) "enforcement_analysis.R".

Before running the code, change your working directory to the folder that contains this README file.

File (i) contains the code necessary to reproduce the analysis in the "Initial Selection of Subjects for Investigation" section of the paper, as well as the related tables and figures in the online appendix.

File (ii) contains the code necessary to reproduce the analysis in the "Selection of Targets for Enforcement" and "Assessment of Monetary Sanctions" sections of the paper, as well as the related tables and figures in the online appendix.

In each case, running the code will produce .tex files for all figures and tables.